Upcoming Challenge

This week I will be working with Pam to create my first-ever wedding cake.

Below is a sketch of what we anticipate it to look like.

Fresh magnolias on a red velvet and vanilla bean cream cheese frosted SQUARE cake... I hope I survive!!

two of my favorite things

I'm pretty sure I have posted once before that two of my favorite things are flowers and ironwork. Well, recently I visited my Alma Mater and shot a few photographs. Way back when, when I went on my first campus tour it was love at first sight. I'll probably share more photographs later on, but I was using my sister's fancy camera, so I played with focusing and this is what I came up with. I wish the rose garden was in better bloom, but I think blooming season for roses is much earlier down here. This place is highly photographed though, so these are probably nothing special, its all just a lesson for me!

Fall into a Wonderland of Reading

Fall into a Wonderland of Reading

That was the theme that my marketing students agreed upon for this year's book fair. It was a major responsibility for the class to take on the promotional and visual merchandising aspects of the fair, and though it may have not come easy, throughout the book fair I received rave reviews from faculty, staff and students about how impressive it was. In fact, most say "it's the best one ever". I thought I'd share some highlights of my students' work. I have so say I am very proud of the students in my class, I cannot believe my time with them is almost done, I hope they learned something from me.

Promotion:

Visual Merchandising:

Spring in The City!

This past weekend, my Mom and I went into The City to play. We had gorgeous weather and beautiful sights to see. My camera was almost dead, so by the time I had taken a video of a dog that looked like a walking Barbie Doll from behind, I only had enough battery for this last photograph. I love the wrought iron, tulips, and just a peek of the Chrysler Building, which is beautiful by itself anyway. Click to enlarge.

Photography experiment

Click on the pictures! This past weekend I played with the V-Girls. They were my models and inspiration as I played photographer and experimented with depth perception and close-ups.


These flowers really pop in the photos, they almost look superimposed because of their color.


Wood pile


Canoe with the girls off in the distance.


Fallen tree


Love this photo. One day she'll be able to climb that tree.


The other medium of the day.


If only I purposely composed this picture with all these shades of purple, what can I say, the clothes were clean and the shoes "findable".

Peony

One of my students told me about how you can load user-created brushes into Photoshop and that got me thinking about the brushes that I use in Illustrator.

I'm a big fan of the pencil brush, but after brief internet research including looking at the link he sent me, I realized I could create my own brush and I did.

I made an art brush of a peony petal and used it to help me draw this peony bud. The sepals are the work of a simple pen drawing, but I used a brush for each of the peony petals and rotated when needed.

This is just the first thing that I tested out today ( I love flowers can you tell?) and I may get the chance to do some more work to it, but I am really supposed to try very hard to do some lesson planning as my real job starts Monday, when I will be teaching FIVE different business classes at a local high school for pretty much the rest of the school year. Needless to say, I really should focus my creativity on trying to make my lessons more interesting and exciting, but drawing and designing keeps creeping into my mind.

BUT I will be channeling some of this creativity into at least one of my classes (yay for Marketing!) as they are "marketing" the summer reading book fair with a theme of "Alice in Wonderland" and I am going to attempt to make them a special Alice themed dessert. Given my latest excursions with sugar cookies and icing, you see where this all stemmed from. So stay posted for some more culinary creativity in the future.



P.S. Leave some comments, folks- don't be shy! Give me some inspiration, challenges of things to create! Thanks for reading to all my regular visitors, you know who you are!

P.P.S. With regard to my sister's jewelry store graphics that I created for the Spring 2009 season and the colors that I researched, they have been in all the magazines I have received as the new color combination. One mag even included a bright blue with the combo which I can appreciate, I might have to use it some how- colors are sometimes inspiring all on their own!

For Christine...

My oldest sister Christine has a website where she sells custom made jewelry. She has kindly allowed me to design a couple banners and avatars for her shop. Below is what we started out with. She loves the lotus flower- yoga is good to her, so she definitely wanted to incorporate it, the colors were of her selection as well. (Click to see larger size, better quality).

BANNER

AVATARS

Then, for the Spring she commissioned me to update the banner. I did some light research and learned about some lovely colors. We kept with the lotus, but I went with bolder colors. I think I want to add more layers to it, but this is what I have for now. Though I went with these bolder colors, I attempted to soften it with a brown sketch line and font color. I think I need more trend education....

BANNER